Diaoyu in Our Heart: The Revealing Contradictions of Chinese Nationalism

The same patriotic feelings that send Chinese to rally for national sovereignty over disputed islands might also explain their surprising and apparently conflicting answers to an online discussion.

Protesters carry banners reading "Declare War Against Japan" and "Japan Get Out of Diaoyu Islands" in Beijing. (AP)

There was another side to the anti-Japanese
demonstrations that rocked Chinese cities this weekend, reacting to
Japanese activists who had landed on a disputed
island chain in the East China Sea. As Chinese protesters asserted their
national prestige in ways symbolic and not, their countrymen on social media held
a very different discussion on the Diaoyu Islands controversy. These two
Chinese reactions, seemingly contradictory, hint at the contours and
complexities of Chinese nationalism, and what it means for China both
domestically and abroad.

A web user named oncebookstore
posted a question on Weibo, China's twitter-style social network: "If your
child were born on the Diaoyu Islands, what nationality would you pick for
him/her: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong or the mainland?" (The islands, also known as
the Senkakus in Japan, are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Japan.) It went viral
on Sunday, retweeted over 20,000 times in nine hours before censors took it down
around midnight. The surprising results would seem to contradict the popular
anti-Japanese protests, undercut the government's efforts to stoke patriotism, and may well baffle outside observers: Chinese
respondents overwhelmingly picked places other than mainland China. Around 40
percent answered Taiwan, followed by Hong Kong with about 25 percent, followed
by Japan. Mainland China was the least popular option. A formal poll, set up on Weibo after the original post was pulled,
returned similar results, with Japan at 20 percent and the mainland at 15.

Chinese will march in the streets to proudly declare their
nation's sovereignty over these five rock-like, uninhabited islands, but when
it comes to picking which flag could hypothetically adorn their child's
passport, China comes last. How could that be? Judging by the surprise and disbelief
in the poll's comment section, the result confuses even the Chinese themselves.

Though contradictory at first glance, the sentiment at the
anti-Japanese protests and that revealed by the Weibo quiz are perhaps not as
inconsistent as they might appear, and could highlight the dual nature of the
nationalistic feelings deeply rooted in Chinese society today. The same Chinese
nationalism that drives citizens to stand up for their native land when outside
forces challenge it could also sharpen their pain
when they observe the depressingly wide gap between China as it is and China as
they wish it could be. Some of the Weibo poll respondents suggested that,
although they might have grudgingly picked Taiwan or Hong Kong or even Japan
for their child's hypothetical nationality, it wounded
them not to choose mainland China as they wished they could. Therein lies the
common ground between the nationalism of the Diaoyu marches and what you might
call the national humility on display in the Weibo poll.

User wang-wei-bin
confessed his conflicted feelings after answering the poll in a Weibo message: "Sigh.
I picked Taiwan, but in fact I love this country. Just that I feel it doesn't
love me."

"The reason I picked Japan is that I don't want to see my
son becoming a traitor to his country like me," feiyuchuqing explained. "What terrible
statistics," she said of the results to which she had contributed.

"If I had a girl I would perhaps pick Taiwan, and if a boy,
Japan, but in any case I would always be waving the Chinese national flag on
the rocks of the Diaoyu Islands," another user wrote in a response that had
been widely retweeted before disappearing with the original quiz.

"Political slogans aside, as a citizen of the globe, I would
rather have the next generation growing up in an place like Taiwan or Japan,"
said zuzhanggaocangwentai. "I don't
want them to have to take poisonous baby formula, sit in brainwashing classes,
and love the party that hurts its people."

Weibozhuanping also saw potential
social advantage abroad: "If we speak about society instead of politics, Japan
has the most fair and humane society. Workers and farmers won't have as hard a
time there as they do in China."

"I vote for Taiwan," said yingdedaobie,
"because that's where you get to vote."

In fact, web users' responses seemed to be driven more by a deep
discontent with the current China than by a veneration for these more developed
economies: a large number of participants put their answers as bluntly as
"Anywhere but the mainland."

The popularity of the quiz and the heated discussion it
engendered also provide a window into the Chinese public's struggle to
reconcile the frustrating social realities surrounding them with the lofty patriotic
ideals they have long internalized, partly as a natural result of living in one
of the world's oldest and most storied societies, and partly through China's
public education and mainstream discourse. These ideals have featured
prominently in recent large-scale public protests against perceived foreign
aggression: the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, controversy
over Japan's tendentious history textbooks, a 2005 dispute over the ownership
of the Diaoyu Islands, and as a reaction against the international
demonstrations against China during the torch relay prior to the 2008 Olympics.
These perceived foreign insults all brought Chinese national rage to a boiling
point and monopolized domestic discourse for weeks. This time, however, as the
familiar government rhetoric on the islands disputes rolls on, a large portion
of the public seems
to be distracted by two sensational episodes of domestic disorder: the
hunt for a high-profile and notorious serial killer, and the
sentencing of a disgraced party official's wife.

As domestic woes increasingly surface in public discourse
here (partly because the rise of social media makes them easier to discuss) and
as China sometimes-uneasily engages with the world, Chinese citizens' perceptions
of patriotism may be changing. In an essay titled "Patriotism
with Chinese Characteristics," Li Chengpeng, a popular blogger and
prominent social critic movingly described this struggle and transformation.
Having long been a "typical Chinese patriot," as Li calls himself, he saw his
beliefs challenged after witnessing evidence of corruption and government
ineptitude during a trip to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. "My definition
of patriotism changed," he wrote, "patriotism is not about bullying mothers of
children who died in the earthquake, while calling for people to stand up to
the foreign bullies of our motherland. ... [It] is about speaking more truth ...
about dignity for the Chinese people."

Oncebookstore,
the creator of the Weibo quiz, agrees. The owner of an independent bookstore in
a southern Chinese province, he told me that his initial hope in asking the
uncomfortable question was to make the public aware that "there are more
pressing issues than the Diaoyu Islands."

"I hope Chinese people can show as much solidarity as they
did in protecting the Diaoyu Islands every time someone is illegally evicted
from his house by officials; I hope they can shout like they did to save the
pro-China Diaoyu activists every time a Chinese dissident is arrested," he
posted on his blog immediately after putting up the quiz.

"Farmlands, houses, and families, they should be the Diaoyu
Islands in our heart."

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